Wake up to Mike Allen’s AM, the 10 stories driving your day

Stories

There are tiny meteorites you may never see

Jon Larsen

It's thought that up to 10 tons of extraterrestrial dust lands on Earth each day. Among the deliveries are these tiny, metallic micrometeorites. Scientists normally hunt for the mini space rocks (typically 0.2 to 0.3 mm in diameter) in polar regions and at the bottom of the ocean, where the samples won't be contaminated by industrial pollution. But Jon Larsen, a jazz musician-turned-researcher, found this micrometeorite and others on some rooftops in Europe. He describes the alien dust, and his quest to find it, in his book In Search of Stardust.